Keep Your Team Focused on What Matters

🌪 Caught in the whirlwind

When everything is urgent, it’s difficult to pin down exactly what needs your attention first. After a while, you might feel like you’re caught up in a stream of to-dos, but never make progress on the ones that matter most.

This is called the whirlwind and it’s the ultimate enemy of execution.

So how do you get things done when you're experiencing a whirlwind? The book The 4 Disciplines of Execution breaks down the two roadblocks: lack of focus and lack of clarity.

🚀 Define your Wildly Important Goals

Unlike many of the tasks on your to-do list, a Wildly Important Goal has to be both important and specific. This isn’t a vision or mission statement but a clear goal that your team can work towards.

A great example of a solid WIG from NASA is: "Put a man on the moon and return them safely by the end of the decade." There was a clear deadline, destination, and definition of success.

Let’s talk about how you can turn your urgent tasks into WIGs like this one.

🔍 Bring things into focus

So you’ve had a conversation with your board and now you have some goals. How do you translate them into WIGs and then bring them to your team?

Try asking yourself these questions:

• What’s the smallest, most specific thing that will have the biggest impact on your business? • What lives at the intersection of “really important” and “never gonna happen”?

Once you have a list, pick 1-2 of these goals.

💎 Double down on clarity

Don’t get too excited! These aren’t WIGs yet. It's likely that some important goals on your list are too vague, for instance: “increase customer satisfaction,” or “reduce marketing costs.” Here's where you clarify them.

To make decisions more defined, answer these 3 questions for each goal:

1. What's the start line?
2. What’s the finish line?
3. What’s the deadline?

Let’s take a look at the general goal “reduce marketing costs.”

🧑‍🔬 Get into the details

You may look at your marketing spend and notice that your customer acquisition cost or CAC is draining the bulk of your budget. With this in mind:

• The start line may be that your CAC is at $35. • The finish line for this goal would be bringing your CAC down to $20. • The deadline for this goal might be Q3 as that’s when you need to have more room in your budget for other marketing efforts.

“Reduce marketing costs” becomes: Reduce our customer acquisition costs from $35 to $20 by the start of Q3.

☀️ You can see clearly now

The precision and efficiency of your team depends on having clear, focused goals from the start. Handing down vague goals to your team might get them moving in the right direction, but the impact will be much smaller by comparison.

Before the next time you sync with your team, try defining, focusing, and clarifying your WIGs. You’ll likely find that this has an immediate effect on their ability to work together toward unified goals.